The next chapter in the Yankees dynasty?

So the playoffs are set: Yankees vs. Angeles, Dodgers vs. Phillies.

The Yankees will try for their 27th pennant. That would pretty much qualify them for a dynasty, wouldn’t it? So in that spirit, I dug up this old iece, taken from a larger review for BookPage in April, 2000.

As the new millennium approached, we saw a seemingly exponential increase in arguments over who’s baseball’s best fill-in-the-blank. Rob Neyer, a columnist for ESPN.com, and Eddie Epstein, a former member of two major league organizations, seek to answer some of those questions in Baseball Dynasties: The Greatest Teams of All Time. The authors do a marvelous job of putting the evidence together, reminiscent of the works of Bill James, the analytic guru who revolutionized baseball statistics. How do the 1999 Yankees compare with other all-time great clubs like the St. Louis Cardinals of the 1940s, or the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s? You want quantitative proof? Dynasties supplies the numbers. Historical context? Got that, too. Amusing anecdotal information? It’s here. Neyer and Epstein liven up their reports with accompanying essays and offer their opinions on the worst teams of all time, as well as the best of the Negro League clubs. They sum up with their definitive answer, which is . . . come on now, did you really think I was going to tell you?

To be sure, there is no shortage of books that proclaim the great and powerful Oz, er, I mean Yankees. Here are just a few:

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness, by Buster Olney
Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat: New York’s Big Three and the Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949-1953, by Sol Gittleman
Management Wisdom from the New York Yankees’ Dynasty: What Every Manager Can Learn from a Legendary Team’s 80-Year Winning Streak, by Dorothy R. Berger
Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees, by Joel Sherman
Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty, by Daniel R. Levitt